


Kaleidoscope

by damnslippyplanet



Category: Firefly
Genre: Beating a Metaphor Into The Ground, Character Study, Gen, Healing, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-23
Updated: 2016-07-23
Packaged: 2018-07-26 07:17:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7565137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/damnslippyplanet/pseuds/damnslippyplanet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Over time, as Serenity becomes a home, River becomes a collector of tiny things. They aren’t her own missing pieces, not quite, but they help on the days when she is all shards, all knives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kaleidoscope

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Redrikki](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Redrikki/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Firefly, In Brief](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1357492) by [Redrikki](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Redrikki/pseuds/Redrikki). 



> (With love and appreciation for the beta help from [bydaybreak](http://archiveofourown.org/users/bydaybreak), [darkpriestess](http://archiveofourown.org/users/darkpriestess), and [victorine](http://archiveofourown.org/users/victorine).)

River saw a kaleidoscope in a museum once - a million years ago, or it might as well have been. An old, old artifact, shown to her back when she was the sort of promising child whose promising life involved things like family trips to museums  

She hadn’t been allowed to touch the fragile toy but she’d been allowed to play with a replica.

It had captivated her for several minutes with its perfect and ever-changing symmetry, its promise of a tidy mathematical precision, the gleam of the colored glass when she’d held it to the light. But the thrill had worn off and she’d been on to the next thing. Always running ahead, Simon chasing behind.

She doesn’t even remember anymore what the next thing had been. But she knows that she once held in her hand a perfect tiny world made of jumbled bits turned into order.

On the days when River is broken, she tries to remember. That broken bits of glass can spill together in a way that seems chaotic, but if they fall into their places and you hold them up in the right light, they become a world that makes perfect sense. She tries hard to remember the moment of peace and perfection when the bits fall into alignment, and the chaos resolves into meaning.

Some days it’s easier than others. Some days she can’t remember the kaleidoscope. Some days she can’t even remember the girl who held it.

* * *

 

Over time, as Serenity becomes a home, River becomes a collector of tiny things. They aren’t her own missing pieces, not quite, but they help on the days when she is all shards, all knives.

Inara lets her have a ribbon strung with shiny mirrored gems. She ties it around River’s wrist. River shivers and does not allow herself to think about the bindings that would hold her when she struggled. Inara never looks at River as if she sees the cracks that spiderweb throughout her fragile sanity. River suspects, on the days when she is lucid enough to suspect anything, that some of Inara’s training may have prepared her to gently handle those who are not entirely whole.

Book doesn’t precisely _give_ her anything, but he doesn’t notice (or at least doesn’t complain) when she keeps one of the pages she ripped from his book. It still doesn’t make any sense but the words are a little like poetry. She carefully cuts out a few words that she likes best - _sky, flock, blood, river_ \- and saves them.

She uses the rest of the page to set a fire in Jayne’s bunk with the words she doesn’t like.

She doesn’t take anything from Jayne for her collection, but she corrects the spelling on the “RIVER KEEP OUT” sign he makes after the fire for the hatch leading to his room. He complains to Mal that she’s trying to kill him. Because it’s one of the days when she has some control over her tongue, she does not point out that smoke inhalation is a very inefficient killing method, or that if she wanted Jayne dead he already would be.

Simon tries to lecture her about the dangers of fire-setting in space, but his voice twitches and his eyes are bright and she knows he’s laughing somewhere inside even if he won’t do it out loud. Sometimes, when she can make her brother laugh, she feels like some of the smallest cracks inside her might mend someday, crooked but whole.

* * *

 

The broken days aren’t all alike. Sometimes she breaks in her sleep, wakes jagged and never finds her way back together. Other days she’s fine for hours until a word or a sound or nothing at all sends her spinning and frantic. It’s like dancing might feel if you were breathless and dizzy but couldn’t stop.

She bounces off things on the broken days - walls, people. Gets bruises she doesn’t remember, that Simon will tell her later are from pounding her fists against walls or running so fast and far that she trips and tumbles the way she never does when she’s in charge of her body. She doesn’t remember any of that; she goes somewhere else, and her body carries on without her.

It’s funny, that she can escape her body now and she couldn’t when she was actually in that place, when they were doing things to her. She felt every one of the needles, all the hands. Now, even though no one touches her without her permission (not anymore, not since the first time she screamed), she flees her body entirely without warning or intention. It goes on without her and even with no one hurting it, it hurts itself while she’s not home.

She tries to explain to Simon why it’s funny - or ironic, at the very least, which some cultures have considered a near-synonym to funny - but he just looks sad eyes at her and she knows she’s saying it all wrong. If she could just get the words right, he’d see why it’s funny.

She thinks the other girl, the River-girl who held the kaleidoscope, knew how to use words in a way that other people understood. It might be one of the things they took from her; one of her empty spaces, where the wind whistles through. She doesn’t always know where the holes in herself are, until she reaches for a thought or a feeling and she falls through the gaps where some part of her has failed to be.

* * *

 

There are good days, too. Sometimes entire strings of them all in a row, like whole and perfect glass beads without a single crack. On the good days, River’s missing pieces still prickle and spark under her skin, but she can bridge the gaps between River-who-was and River-who-is. She can bear touch enough to let Kaylee braid her hair with Inara’s ribbon, and she knows when Mal’s joking or serious. Simon smiles with his eyes, not just his mouth.

Jayne’s still Jayne. Even on the good days she thinks he could do with another bunk fire, but she promised Simon, and anyway she’s out of the pages from Book’s Bible.

In the engine room she finds a handful of scrap metal from one of Kaylee’s project. Twisted little discards; the bit that was left after the rest got used up. She tries to wear one in her hair for a while but it falls off somewhere. She still has three pieces left and puts them safely away with the ribbon and the words under her mattress.

They stop at a planet. There are meetings to be kept and trades to be made, but there’s also time for a trip to the bazaar. It’s almost too much - too much noise, too many faces, too many hands - but just in the way she gets overwhelmed easily now, not in the way that is her brain telling her danger will happen soon. She’s pretty sure she’s the most dangerous thing at the market today.  Everyone walks around squishy and exposed and smiling at her as if she’s a girl and not a weapon.

She goes looking for something new for her collection, something of her own. There are a million things to buy but none of them are right. Afterwards, wandering outside while Mal and Zoe do something with guns and yelling nearby, she finds a pebble that wants to be hers. It’s a perfect oval, smooth in her palm, a shade of dark gray that tastes good in her mind.

She takes the pebble back with her and when Inara asks how their trip planetside went, Kaylee tells the story about the yelling, and Mal tells them about their next job.  River tells about her pebble, which seems at least as important. _This_ , Simon thinks is funny. His sense of humor really is terrible. Inara likes the pebble, though, and Jayne’s only bleeding a little bit, so the trip seems to have been successful.

Later, River studies Zoe’s gun holster. How it fits against her like it belongs there, how it makes her weapon an extension of her own body. She’ll look for something like that, maybe, at the next market. A bag or holster for her tiny things - to carry them with her, close and part of her all the time. So she can touch the smooth pebble whenever she wants, or the shiny mirror-gem, or read the book-words.

For now the tiny things live under her mattress. She takes them out often, arranges and rearranges them into different shapes and patterns spread out across her blanket or the floor. There are only a few things, but so many different ways they can lie in relation to each other - different amounts of space left between them, different angles, held up to the light or cupped in the darkness of her hands.

* * *

 

Day after day, River watches the life of the ship. Everyone has patterns. Book exercises after breakfast; Simon takes notes in the evenings in a notebook he thinks she doesn’t know about. Jayne cleans his guns more often than necessary.  She doesn’t like the guns, but she likes the smell of the oil and they’re not loaded while he’s cleaning them, so that’s all right.

Kaylee and Inara mostly tell each other stories, when Serenity’s flying smoothly and not in need of Kaylee’s attention. But even then, at least once a day Kaylee checks everything in the engine room, touching things, tightening and loosening and whispering to the ship. River can’t always hear what Kaylee says to the ship, but sometimes she thinks she hears Serenity whisper back. She wonders if Kaylee knows that the ship loves her.

Zoe and Wash disappear into their room whenever they can, and everyone knows what they’re doing, but no one else _knows_ the way River does, on the days when she knows things that she shouldn’t. They disappear and melt together, and she can’t help but feel echoes rippling through her blood sometimes. It makes her limbs go shivery-warm so she distracts herself by calculating navigation paths to stars they aren’t planning to visit. Just in case they should need to escape. Even on the good days, it’s good to know where the escape routes are.

The ship and its inhabitants bounce off each other in repetitions and variations. Patterns enough everywhere for comfort, and deviations enough for interest. It feels like a life, even if it’s not a life that the River-girl would have ever imagined.

On the best days she visits Wash in the console room. She knows hundreds of stars and planets, but there are so many more to learn, and navigator’s tricks for flying among them. Wash teaches her how to fly _to_ places, not just _from_ them.

He doesn’t have anything she can put into her collection, but sometimes she arranges the pebble and the metal bits and the words and the ribbon-gems into the shapes of constellations Wash has shown her. These are configurations she wouldn’t have thought of on her own, but she likes them. She can hear Wash’s voice naming them in her head.

Wash explains all the different buttons that make Serenity fly, all of her tricks and secrets.

Well. _Most_ of her tricks and secrets.

* * *

 

River knows a few hiding places on Serenity that even Wash doesn’t. Even Kaylee. There are little spaces that no one else in the crew would fit into, but she fits perfectly, like they were waiting for her to fill them.

Sometimes, on the days that she wakes up remembering her name and stays that way all day long, she crawls into one of those spaces. She curls up tight in the thrumming heart of the ship and listens to Serenity’s songs.

She fits there, and inside Serenity’s bones she can pretend that she herself is a missing piece of the ship, come home to stay. Sometimes she can imagine that Serenity herself is a missing piece of something bigger, looking for the right place to fit among the stars. The stars and planets themselves, spinning and orbiting through space, might be looking for their own places to fit and feel safe. Somewhere out beyond them, the galaxies. Patterns in patterns, shifting and mathematical and lovely.

Sometimes, there in the dark and throb of the ship’s life, when she can close her eyes and feel everyone moving through their permutations around her, she can almost see the design of the whole universe falling into place with her at its still center. She’s almost sure it’s beautiful, broken pieces and all.

Serenity hums and jangles and presses warm and close around River, and she sleeps, and wakes still knowing her own name.


End file.
